“The current private cloud model that requires companies to invest heavily in virtualization and maintaining their own data centers is not a “real cloud” model, according to an Amazon executive.

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services (AWS), argued that the current model of private clouds does not provide the capital expenditure (capex) savings and scalability of a true cloud offering. AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon.com.

“Companies usually are not able to provision accurately the amount of data center capacity that they require, and this problem recurs when they create their own internal cloud infrastructure,” said Jassy, who was in town Thursday for the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) Distinguished Infocomm Speaker Series. He noted that companies would still have to dedicate a proportion of their IT resources, such as software engineers, to maintain the data centers instead of freeing them up to create products that will differentiate their companies from the competition.

This runs counter to the definition of cloud computing, which Jassy said constitutes five attributes: changing capex to variable operational costs; a pay-as-you-go payment model; allowing companies to have truly elastic, scalable data center capacity, fast product time-to-market; and reducing the focus on hardware management. These attributes are in accordance to Gartner’s definition of cloud computing, he said.”